Talking Over the Racial Divide

The students started trying to understand one another by explaining the origins of their names, then conveying their cultural identity in three objects.

Mike, a sophomore criminal-justice major, said his Brazilian parents hoped his name would make him sound more American, “whatever that means,” he added, smiling. He sat with his hands in his coat pockets and the zipper pulled up to his mouth on the first day of a course about race here at the University of Maryland, where the goal was to re-examine a lifetime of assumptions in two-hour shifts.

On the second day, Mike brought his objects in a Timberland box, from the boots he started wearing in North Newark, N.J., where lots of black and Hispanic kids did. The objects included a collection of press clippings about homicides in his neighborhood and a photograph of his 5-year-old nephew, Matthew, to help him remember his obligations back home.

Across from him sat Lindi, who grew up in Chevy Chase, Md., a wealthy suburb of Washington. She held up the bow hair clip she’d earned as captain of her high-school cheerleading team; a small box in the shape of Africa, because she had lived in South Africa for the first month of her life; and a Hamsa, a symbol to ward off evil spirits she got on a free trip to Israel for young Jews.

“I didn’t realize how much of a minority I was until I was in the majority,” she said of the trip. Back in the United States, she said, she tried to eat out on Easter but found restaurants closed.

On seven Tuesdays this spring, The Chronicle watched as 14 students met in a course dedicated to discussing race, a perennial, at times explosive issue on campuses and across the country. Maryland offers the course as part of an effort to make students more proficient with difference — to help them have thorny conversations on uncomfortable topics, see the value of other people’s experiences, and gain some perspective on their own. At least, that’s the hope. But how potent a tool can talk be?

Some students walked into the classroom here a long way off from racial consciousness. Most had enrolled simply to fill out their course load or check off a diversity requirement. A few had grown up in segregated neighborhoods and schools. But here was a rare opportunity to participate in a dialogue with peers from diverse backgrounds, facilitated by two instructors, Benjamin L. Parks, a white man, and Erica C. Smith, a black woman. The trajectory toward understanding would prove messy, halting, but — maybe, ultimately — revealing.

The class established ground rules: Keep it real. Be specific. Avoid making personal attacks. Assume good will. Dialogue-based courses developed at the University of Michigan in 1989 provided a model. To encourage frank discussion, The Chronicle agreed to use students’ first names.

“We want you to be able to have tough conversations,” Mr. Parks told the class on the first day. “Learning can’t happen unless you get real.”

The notion of a “safe space” is imprecise and counterproductive, many instructors of dialogue courses at Maryland believe. They prefer to think of their classrooms as courageous places where students aren’t afraid to express and hear things that make them uncomfortable. At first, that was a tall order for many of the students. Politeness reigned. Hearing about one another’s foreign and Americanized names or racial experiences, several retreated to the same noncommittal word, “interesting.”

The exercise with the objects helped the students recognize their identities as complicated, multifaceted, and socially constructed. It also sparked some early connections. A Coptic Christian whose family came from Egypt sat near the daughter of El Salvadoran immigrants. Around the circle were a Cameroon-born, Maryland-raised budding journalist and a white sister of a Marine.

The son of frugal Chinese immigrants, who grew up owning one pair of shoes at time, carried his objects in the box that once held his prized pair of Kobe Bryant Nikes. He had bought the shoes to mark his progress up the economic ladder. Baye, a black senior majoring in American studies, leaned forward. His favorite NBA player, he said, was the Chinese star Yao Ming. It was one of the first bids at bridging difference.

Among the objects Baye (pronounced “Bye”) shared was a tattoo on his right forearm: “I solemnly swear that I’m up to no good.”

Sitting nearby, Sophie, a pale-skinned, half Iraqi Englishwoman, gaped. She recognized the vow of mischief from Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Sometimes, she said, your assumptions about other people fail you.

“I never would’ve put you down as a Harry Potter fan,” she told Baye.

He smiled. “I’m not what people usually think.”

The students disagreed at first on the importance of race or how deeply woven it is into the fabric of American life. But they rarely did so directly.

Such divergent perspectives had complicated previous diversity efforts at the university, says Mark Brimhall-Vargas, who directed the dialogue courses when they began about 15 years ago. Before that, efforts like speaker series and cultural events were derided from all sides as either superficial or shoving diversity down white students’ throats, said Mr. Brimhall-Vargas, who is now chief diversity officer and associate provost at Tufts University. The dialogue courses arose as a response: to meet people where they were, ground the subject matter in students’ own experiences, and encourage learning through reflection and discussion.

In this spring’s course, the students came from very different places. Race was an inescapable fact for the minority students, even as they tried to play with its ironclad rules.

Mari, whose father is Afro-Caribbean and whose mother is biracial (black and white), rode a skateboard as a way of defying categories. That was uncommon, he said, for a black man in his neighborhood of Baltimore.

Baye, the Harry Potter fan from just north of the Bronx, who described himself as “dark-skinned and big,” wore a New York Rangers hockey jersey to one class and talked about his affection for museums and Broadway musicals. But his own group and society more broadly, he said, could tolerate only so much self-invention. One day he proposed an exercise: having students say what racial and cultural categories they thought one of their classmates belonged to. He was the first subject. His race was black, someone said, and his culture African-American.

Baye waved it off. “I don’t identify as African-American,” he said. His mother is Jamaican, his father Senegalese. He often felt like he didn’t fit in among the American-born black New Yorkers he grew up with. Other kids taunted him, he said, as an “African booty scratcher.” He called them slaves.

Race had shaped his friendships and relationships. One white friend’s grandmother refused to look at him; another’s father adored him but warned his daughter not to date black men. When he would go out with a white woman, his stock rose while hers fell, he said, “like she’s a car or something.”

Some of the white students felt freer to slip from the bonds of race when it suited them, or to question its legacy, and even its existence. One white student said race wasn’t a big deal. “It’s not a significant piece we should be relishing in,” she said, her foot bobbing.

Facilitators of racial-dialogue courses have noticed that perception take hold in recent years, as many students have been raised to aspire to a postracial ideal of colorblindness. But that dream can be a dodge, or even an insult. While seemingly the embodiment of Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision, colorblindness sometimes feels to minority students like a denial of the toll race still takes on them.

Sophie, the light-skinned, half Iraqi Englishwoman, rejected the idea that she was white. Instead, she identified with the Latino culture of her husband.

Lindi, the white woman born in South Africa, said she sometimes checks the box on forms to indicate that she’s African-American, even though she knows she’s not supposed to.

Ms. Smith asked Lindi why she does it. Africa was where she first drew breath, Lindi replied. “I think race is based off personal life experience and what you know,” she told the class, “and not far-off history.”

After the course, she explained that she finds such classification odd. “I don’t feel like an honest answer is even necessary,” she said. “When they ask questions on these things, it further engrains this racial divide between everyone.” Her answer, she said, was a form of rebellion.

Some of the minority students saw her action differently: as cultural appropriation. They kept that view to themselves.

Students’ backgrounds tended to shape what they got out of the course. For minority students, the dialogue did little to reframe their thinking. It did, though, give them an opportunity to trade perspectives and bond with other students, in a room where others looked like them. But for many white students, hearing about their classmates’ experiences upended their assumptions.

When long-held beliefs get tested, people often dismiss what they don’t want to hear. The facilitators tried to strike a balance between drawing students out and challenging their ideas, especially the white students.

At first, many of them resisted the idea that they benefited from privilege. When the topic came up, their body language showed their discomfort. Several fidgeted, tapped their toes, and rocked back in their chairs. Privilege, they said, was more likely to be held by minorities, who could claim an edge on college applications or in the workplace.

“Some people might get jobs if the company is trying to diverse it,” Lindi said.

Mr. Parks asked if it was possible that white people had privilege. That was the instructors’ dialogic approach: not offering answers, but phrasing a question to spark reflection. But that can do only so much when historical and theoretical understanding isn’t shared. A white student said one day that the idea of privilege hadn’t entered his thinking until a year ago. Mari, the black skateboarder from Baltimore, had long been familiar with the concept of double-consciousness. (Developing a common framework is one reason some of the courses at Maryland will be two weeks longer next semester, to allow time to discuss fundamental concepts at the start.)

The disparate depths of knowledge can place a burden on minority students. After Lindi’s comment about affirmative action, Mike, the Latino student from Newark, described privilege as longstanding and intertwined with structures and systems of power. It’s distinct from what the white students were describing, he said, the isolated examples of temporary advantage.

Around the country, minority students have felt worn down by having to act as “professors of race” on top of their regular responsibilities. Mike didn’t mind. “I don’t have a problem explaining things,” he said later. Though it can be frustrating when people make ignorant comments, he said, he also knew the shoe could be on the other foot. In his neighborhood, it was unusual both to have parents who were married and to get a scholarship to a private high school. “In that room, I was colored,” he said of the class. “Back home, I was privileged.”

One of the strengths of the dialogue course was the diversity of the students, the instructors came to understand, and they wished they had done more to bring those nuances to the fore. Race was more than black and white. It was Arab, Asian, and Latino, with identities refracted through class, neighborhood, skin tone, and to what extent a student’s parents had assimilated.

The more vocal minority students could describe race in concrete, personal detail. When those students were absent, the instructors sometimes struggled with how forcefully to confront white students’ assumptions.

One day, Lindi wondered if demographic change might simply resolve racial problems, if white people became a minority. For now, she said, the priority should be self-examination. “We have to focus on ourselves,” she said.

Mr. Parks turned to her. “I’m wrestling with how to say this, Lindi, because you strike me as a warm and open person,” he said. “But that statement struck me as white privilege.”

Sophie came to her defense. Everyone has a struggle, she said, and no one should be made to feel bad.

Advising people to focus on themselves and let time take care of the rest may ring hollow when they feel under attack, said Mr. Parks, who referred to social-justice movements like Black Lives Matter.

“Black Lives Matter? All lives matter,” Sophie said. “Hispanic lives matter.”

At several points, the Asian, black, and Latino students offered gentle guidance to their white peers, helping them recognize their privilege without browbeating them. One day, after an activity in pairs, Mari remarked that privilege often exerts an invisible influence.

Ryan, a white freshman from suburban Maryland, picked up the thread. He mentioned cultural bias on standardized tests. One example was a question about horseback riding.

How should someone respond to that, to being called out for the privilege suggested by that hobby? Mari distinguished two reactions, guilt and awareness.

“If you have ridden horses,” he said, “that’s not something to feel bad about…"

“Yeah,” Ryan jumped in.

"… just acknowledge it,” Mari finished, because not everyone has that opportunity.

White people in interracial dialogues can feel like they’re walking on eggshells, Mari later said. Throughout the class, he sought opportunities to send reassuring signals. “If they think people are going to jump down their throats,” he said, “they’ll never venture out on the ledge and be vulnerable.” Taking a risk and being open to change, he believed, is necessary for true progress.

“If we make the conscious choice to do the thing that’s a little bit harder,” Mari said, like striking up a conversation with strangers or resisting the temptation to scoff at privilege, “we’ll move forward.”

Ryan heard in Mari’s remarks an invitation to participate. The white student had been through racial-awareness activities before, he said, but they seemed to have preordained conclusions that people like him were the cause of inequality.

When Mari said people shouldn’t be mocked for their privilege, Ryan felt validated. “To me, that was the biggest step,” Ryan said. “I became much more willing to engage.”

Engagement comes in many forms. For several white students it meant taking an intellectual approach.

By the course’s midpoint, Mr. Parks and Ms. Smith worried that some students were staying in their heads as a way of distancing themselves. But the purpose of the course isn’t to induce shame or to lead students to a particular conclusion. It’s to encourage them to examine their own lives in light of others’. If the students detached from their own feelings, the instructors thought, they would never really hear one another’s.

With three classes remaining, the instructors tried a few exercises to bring home race’s immediacy. In one, students stood in a circle as Mr. Parks read a series of statements. It was assumed from a young age that you would go to college. No one in your immediate family has ever been addicted to drugs or alcohol. You’ve never been the only person of your racial or ethnic group in a class or workplace. After each one, the students stepped forward if it applied.

Several of the students were surprised by how often they stepped forward. Ryan confessed that it made him feel not just vulnerable, but defensive.

The instructors could see in the students’ journal assignments that they were starting to probe their assumptions and see themselves with new eyes. They were working on their final projects, personal essays exploring some aspect of race that made them deeply uncomfortable, something they would feel physically anxious to acknowledge and reluctant to divulge. And yet in class, some students still favored abstraction over frank acknowledgment.

In the next-to-last class, Ms. Smith and Mr. Parks tried another exercise. The group split in two. Those who felt they experienced “light-skin privilege” went with Mr. Parks into another room. Those who didn’t stayed with Ms. Smith.

The group divided along unpredictable lines. Some Asian and Latino students self-selected as privileged; others didn’t. As the privileged students settled in, they described how uncomfortable they felt to be separated from their classmates.

“This is a weird activity,” said Lindi. Mr. Parks asked her what “weird” felt like. Several times that day he prompted students to describe their feelings, occasionally drawing his fist to his chest for emphasis.

Some thought they wouldn’t learn much with their classmates in the other room, while others worried what those students really thought of them. “I don’t want them to think I’ve had the perfect life,” said a white senior. Another student, a Korean-American who had said on the first day that race shouldn’t exist as a category, expressed guilt about her privilege and her desire to share it. A Latina student felt bad living in a prosperous suburb, she said, when her cousins from the city would visit. But the term “privilege,” a few students said, also seemed accusatory and unfair.

“I haven’t done anything to have that privilege,” said one student. “I like to think I’ve earned everything.”

“Yeah,” Ryan agreed. “That resonates with me.” He turned to a white classmate. “When someone says you’re in college just because you’re white,” Ryan asked him, “does that make you mad?”

It did, the two young men agreed. They had worked hard to make good choices. Dismissing their accomplishments as a result of privilege, Ryan said, “delegitimizes your work and your life.”

In the other room, the students who felt they didn’t benefit from light-skin privilege were more comfortable speaking freely. That’s why they often self-segregate, they said, and it’s part of how they learned to code-switch to better fit in with majority culture. Several students told Ms. Smith that they probably wouldn’t share those thoughts with the others.

When the two groups reconvened, the tension was thick. Eye contact was furtive.

The class then did something called a fishbowl exercise. The privileged group sat in the middle and debriefed on what they had just discussed while their classmates listened. Then the outer group recounted what they had heard. After that, they switched places. In the end, the nonprivileged group decided to share what they’d said when they were alone.

The awkwardness started to ease. The conversation grew more candid. Several of the students said they sensed they were hearing, at last, what their classmates really thought. “I feel like there’s been a weight lifted off our shoulders,” a white student said.

The discussion lingered on the idea that the term “white privilege” could make some students feel like their lives and accomplishments were discredited. “Sure, there are advantages you grew up with,” said one of the students from the nonprivileged group. “But it wasn’t your choice.”

Mike could appreciate where some of the white students were coming from, he said. The reaction is similar to what he and other minorities feel, he said, when people assume they benefit unfairly from affirmative action.

The exercise marked a turning point. On the last day, the students shared more openly. They weren’t tiptoeing anymore, venturing instead to share their frustrations and fears. If they had achieved the goal of the course, learning to speak honestly across difference, they were also at the beginning of a longer and more arduous process of forging understanding.

Prompted by Mr. Parks, several students described their final essays examining an aspect of race that made them uncomfortable. Several students acknowledged that they sometimes felt uneasy among people of other races. Sophie, the half-Iraqi Englishwoman, described how she had left a recent class and made her way across campus. When a black man slowed near her, she tensed up. Then, to her embarrassment, he asked her for directions to the bus.

“It’s difficult for me to admit that,” she said. “I’m a minority.”

Several black and Latino students shared their perspective on moments like those. They often feared being perceived as threatening. Baye said he crosses to the other side of the street when he sees white women coming. Mari said he tends to keep his distance and look at his phone when walking at night.

He started becoming keenly aware in middle school, he said, of his place in the world. As the class wound down, he described one episode that left a mark. He and his grandmother, who is white, went to the mall the summer before eighth grade. He tagged along as she shopped, checking his phone as he trailed behind her, looking up every so often to make sure he didn’t lose her.

As they made their way to the exit, he realized she had gotten too far ahead. He ran to catch up.

Before he could reach her, a security guard blocked his way. Mari realized what the guard must have seen — not a grandson trying to rejoin his grandmother, but a young black man running after an elderly white woman. He remembered how the people around him quickly dispersed. He wondered what their lasting impression of him would be. Could they see him as he was, a bookish kid who loved documentaries and mythology, or was he just some young thug?

“That’s not something you forget,” he said softly.

The class fell silent.

Sophie, who until that point had disclaimed her whiteness, spoke first. “As a white woman,” she said, “I’m really, really sorry you have to deal with that.”

At the time, Mari wasn’t sure how to respond. Part of him felt bad that Sophie was expressing such distress. Should he reassure her?

That moment stood out as a powerful one as Mr. Parks and Ms. Smith reflected on the course. “So much of the credit,” Mr. Parks said, “goes to Mari.” But moments like those also need a facilitator cultivating trust and patiently sanding away politeness and resistance.

The exchange with Sophie stuck with Mari, too. A few weeks after the course, he said it had become clear to him how genuinely moved she was and why that mattered.

“In that moment, I was just glad that she listened,” he said. For her to understand how an episode like that could affect someone from a very different background felt meaningful.

“I didn’t want her to move mountains,” said Mari. “I just wanted her to hear me.”

Dan Berrett writes about teaching, learning, the curriculum, and educational quality. Follow him on Twitter @danberrett, or write to him at dan.berrett@chronicle.com.